The Ient Family: Family History

Arrival in Japan

As I said, it took 28-29 days to go from Singapore up to Japan proper. Now Singapore to Nagasaki is about 2,500 miles.

This is the route we took up here [pointing to the map], called in there to Hong Kong, and went across into Taiwan and to Japan. Japan is made up of three large islands: Hokkaido, Honshu and Kyushu [pointing to the map]. Down here where these islands meet in here, that’s called the Inland Sea, just in there [pointing to the map again].

We, 100 RAF, finished up on a small island on the Inland Sea called Innoshima. We arrived at the entrance to the Inland Sea and we landed at a place called Shimonoseki[i], and from there we were then taken by train and ferry to Innoshima. I will read you a little paragraph about our arrival at Shimonoseki from a book written by a fellow POW:

“By this time, as you can well imagine, we were in a pretty bad state. Our first stop was Shimonoseki, We left the ferry; we were herded like cattle through specially constructed wooden passageways with waist high wooden bars on either side. We didn’t march, we struggled through this place the best way we could. And beyond these there were hundreds of Japanese civilians row upon row, bidden no doubt, to see some of the spoils of war. We were on display! The crowd didn’t jeer, they didn’t roar, it was absolutely silent and inscrutable. The sounds was punctuated by the gasps and groans of those riddled by dysentery and malnutrition who were collapsing. The brutish guards reasserted themselves. Men were beaten and clouted unmercifully. If that didn’t serve to get them on their feet, prodded and jabbed them with their bayonets. Some of them unconscious would never move again; the cortege was not allowed to stop or even pause. If a man failed to walk towards the head of the column passing fellas might, with luck, haul him back to his knees and drag him along. If he was in the rear he had to be abandoned for there was no turning back, not even looking back. The whispers ran up the files that those who had fallen well behind were being bayoneted to death where they lay."

So this is our introduction to the Japanese people and Japan proper, and as you can imagine we were in a bad way and as I’ve explained to you, if you talk to us, we talk about that journey from there to there [pointing to the map, Singapore to Japan]. I’ve glossed over quite a bit of it, but it was bad, no two ways about it. Our poor state on the journey formed the basis of the sickness, the dysentery, diarrhoea, beriberi, and all the rest of it.

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